out of inodes

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Jul 051999
 

out of inodes

This article shows you how I dealt with an "out of inodes" problem.

How’d it happen?

I was installing the entire ports tree on a new box.  It froze.  So I restarted it.  Then it froze again.  OK, this time I noticed the following messages on the console:
Jul  5 14:25:48 little /kernel: pid 431 (cpio), uid 0 on /usr2: 
                                                     out of inodes
Jul  5 14:26:19 little last message repeated 2550 times
Jul  5 14:28:20 little last message repeated 10276 times
Jul  5 14:28:25 little last message repeated 451 times

inode background

The problem is that we didn’t have enough inodes.  This is a common problem when you have many files of a small size.  If you look at the man page for newfs, you’ll see the following:
-f frag-size
     The fragment size of the file system in bytes.  It must be a pow

  2 Responses to “out of inodes”

  1. Jonatan Wallmander says:
    March 24, 2002 at 7:22 pm

    I didn’t know what inodes were when encountering this problem due to qmail saving up loads of undelivered messages. Now I do know.

    Thanks!